Experiences of the Accessible Information Standards in Health and Care Report (2022)

Summary

Healthwatch Stockton-on-Tees (HWS) supported the Healthwatch England (HWE) ‘Your Care, Your Way’ campaign during March - May 2022. Due to unforeseen circumstances, HWS were not able to receive feedback from the paper copy surveys in time to share with HWE in May 2022.

However, HWS have been able to use people’s feedback to understand how the Accessible Information Standard (AIS) is working on a local level to find out how people experience receiving health information from health and care services.

We heard from twenty-four people. Fifteen people told us that they require communication support to understand their health and care and would therefore be covered by the AIS. Nine people told us that they don’t require support to understand their health and care.

Findings

The overall findings of this engagement, based on what people have told us, show that:

• Receiving an appropriate level of support from family, carers, and support staff to access and understand information, and to communicate with health and care services is important for those people that are covered by the AIS.
• People who are covered by the AIS experience disadvantage in accessing health and care information when needed, and this has had an impact on the quality of care that they received.
• People who are covered by the AIS have been refused a request for support to understand health care information when they have asked, and at times they’ve not been provided with health care information that they could understand or access.
• Those who are covered by the AIS are more likely to experience difficulties in accessing health and care services - particularly GP services and dentists, because of communication problems.
• People who are covered by the AIS reported that the quality of communication from health and care services has got slightly worse since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. People who aren’t covered by the AIS have reported that communication has stayed the same.

Recommendations

Based on the findings, the following recommendations have been made:

1. Health and care services to be accountable for delivering the Accessible Information Standard.
2. Every health and care service to have an accessibility champion so that health and social care staff know who is responsible for leading local accessible information policy and delivery, and to support staff awareness of their compliance with the standard.
3. To involve people with communication needs in designing better services.
4. To provide mandatory training on accessible information for all health and care staff - to enable staff to understand the standard and regularly provide information in the formats patients need, and to proactively ask patients about their communication needs.